In my experience
As a child of famed painter Lucian Freud, novelist Susie Boyt’s unconventional childhood left her craving order when she became a mother. Now, she wishes she could do it differently
My chief subject as a writer is all the different ways family life can go wrong and what, if anything, can be done about it. I have hundreds of chances, at my desk each day, to scrutinise difficulties I have seen, read or imagined and rearrange them to my heart’s content. I preside over my characters from my little office at the top of the house, with the fan heater blaring, while the so-called real world takes place downstairs. I’m like God crossed with the madwoman in the attic – only there’s more instant coffee and After Eights.
In my latest novel, Loved And Missed, the teacher-heroine Ruth, scalded by her estrangement from her grown-up daughter, has another chance as a mother when she takes on sole charge of her baby granddaughter, Lily. This time, she’ll get the love right, she resolves. The theme of second chances and all the riches they offer burns brightly throughout the book. And as I negotiated Ruth and Lily’s lives, I found myself thinking, what would I do differently if I had my time again?
One thought came through to me, strong and clear: I would be less cautious. Being careful, when I was growing up, was how I defined and defended myself. A fretful, slightly forlorn child, from a single-parent family of five – which often swung wildly from its hinges – Iliked to reach for the safest things: crochet, toast, old Hollywood musicals. The alarm I felt at bills accumulating unopened in the hall… my mother’s uneven spirits… the antics of my brothers, which often involved the emergency services… these things made me keep my head down. Risk-taking was as alien as living on Mars. While I missed out on quite a bit in terms of excitement, I had a lot of adventures inside the pages of books. I waited for unreliable men in dingy 1920s Paris bars; I languished on American Civil War battlefields; I took the measure of Russian ballrooms in stiff embellished satins, and woke giddy with excitement in 1960s London bedsits as my house-thief boyfriend surprised me with sacks of jewels. As a student, I heard that the poet TS Eliot was told at Harvard, ‘Youthful rashness is not likely to be one of your attributes until you are middle-aged.’ I shrugged my shoulders, thinking: ‘You and me both.’
FAMILY LIFE
When my daughters were little, we spent hours painstakingly making apple purée for their dolls.
